Law Schools

Is The Pace Tuition Discount A Treat Or A Dirty Trick?

Pace did something new, but is it good?

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Something new happened! Let’s give Pace credit for that. Instead of flapping around with the same set of ineffective stopgap measures to combat the evaporation of law school applicants, David Yassky, dean of Pace Law School, tried a whole new ineffective stopgap measure. A few private law schools offer tuition discounts equal to their in-state competitors. Pace Law is offering tuition reciprocity with the home-state public law school of any state. Are you from Kentucky and want to go to Pace? Well, instead of paying the $45,376/year Pace charges, you can pay the $20,988/year Kentucky College of Law charges to in-state residents. Neat!

Kinda.

Because you’d have to be incredibly stupid to want to go to Pace (ranked #138 and only kind of in New York) instead of the University of Kentucky (ranked #63 and totally in Kentucky). Imagine you are sitting there with some fine Kentucky bourbon. And then somebody from White Plains comes along and offers you a virgin Manhattan for twice the price. Even if the nice White Plains man says, “What if I told you that I can make the virgin Manhattan cost the same as your bourbon?” wouldn’t you say, “Dude, there’s no alcohol in it? Why are you bothering me? Go away.”

Dangling access to the New York legal market is a key part of Pace’s plan. It’s the allure of a fancy cocktail over the known quantity of hard liquor. Here’s the line I fear flyover people will fall for:

The program is aimed at luring applicants who want a “first rate New York legal education” but may be “discouraged by the high cost of living in New York,” Pace’s dean, David Yassky, a Yale Law School graduate and former New York City taxi commissioner, told Law Blog. “We understand we’re in competition with low tuition, state-supported schools,” he said.

The “lure” of going to a low-tuition state school is that those schools are supposed to set you up to be competitive in your state employment market. The “discouragement” of Pace isn’t just the cost of living in New York, it’s having to compete in the New York legal employment market. Pace is getting its lunch eaten by more prestigious New York schools, and the diploma has limited, if any, worth in other markets. Even if you believe Pace is offering a “first rate New York legal education,” it’s certainly NOT offering first-rate New York legal jobs prospects.

And there are caveats to the Pace program that make it even more suspect. The tuition matching isn’t going to be offered to everybody. Pace told the WSJ Law Blog that “eligibility would be mostly based on applicant GPA and LSAT scores with a loose cut-off around the median scores of Pace’s own students.” Well, people who score better than the median scores of Pace’s current students are probably already getting heavy scholarship offers from Pace and 10 schools just like it. So how much of a discount are people really getting with this program versus what Pace was already willing to give them?

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If that thought doesn’t make you think it’s a PR stunt, this fact really makes it look like a trap:

Pace’s spokesman later emailed Law Blog to clarify that the matching rate isn’t renewed automatically but is “contingent upon the student remaining in the top 50% of the class.”

That’s shady. Pace is taking my noble Kentuckian, dangling the bright lights of New York White Plains (lol) in front of her at “state school” prices, and then pulling her discount if she has a rough first year. So now she’s away from home, owes Pace $20K, and can either pay Pace another $90K to finish her degree, or quit and go crawling home like she got mugged at Grand Central. Oh, and does anybody want to tell me the employment rate of carpetbaggers who can’t finish in the top-half at Pace Law but want to work in NYC?

Neat, huh?

But there are students who could benefit from this program, and those are students who go to Cooley, InfiLaw schools, or most people who are going to go to whatever law school they can get into, regardless of price or reason. Not everybody who lives in Kentucky can get into Kentucky. Some of those kids could get into Pace and are going to go to law school anyway. It’s a trap, but there are kids who can only get into trap law schools.

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The band plays on, but Pace changed up the tempo.

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